Designing Data Access - Professional SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services - page 128

The main point here is that you can use whatever query language your database product understands.
Reporting Services provides a query editor designed especially for Transact-SQL and a generic editor
that will accommodate other query languages and SQL dialects.

Data Sources
A data source contains the connection information for a data set. Data sources either can be created only
for a specific report data set or may be shared among different reports. Since most reports will get data
from a common data source, it often makes sense to create a shared data source. There are a number of
advantages in using shared data sources. Even if you don't have several reports that need to share a
central data source, it takes no additional effort to create a shared data source. This may still be advanta-
geous in this case as the data source is managed separately from each report and can be easily updated
if necessary. Then, as you add new reports, the shared data source will already be established and
deployed to the Report Server.

In a Visual Studio report project there are three different ways to create a data source:

❑ Creating a data source in the Report Wizard.

❑ Creating a data source from the Project Add Item template.

❑ Creating a data source when defining a data set.

Let's look at each of these in detail.

Creating a Data Source in the Report Wizard
For this exercise, you may create a new report project or open an existing report project. From the
Solution Explorer, right-click the Reports folder and choose Add New Report to launch the Report
Wizard. The first page in the wizard will give you the opportunity to select an existing shared data
source or create a new data source, as shown in Figure 5-4.

Creating a Data Source from the Project Add Item Template
In the Solution Explorer, point to Reports. Right-click, and choose Add Add New Item. The options in

this dialog include Report Wizard, Report, and Data Source. Selecting the Data Source option creates a
shared data source.

➪

The following is an example of the standard Data Link Properties dialog used to define a data source.
If your database server was named DWServer, this name would be selected or entered in the first box,
under step 1 in this dialog, as shown in Figure 5-5.

If you are working with a local development database server installed on the same computer, you can
enter . (a period) or localhost . Otherwise, enter the name of the database server. In step 2, you choose
the security authentication method to be used by the database server to check security credentials.
SQL Server may be configured to use Integrated Windows Security or both SQL Server Security and
Integrated Windows Security. In a development environment, integrated security is a simple choice.

Finally, you select or type the database name.